More Panda-mania

The Chinese Panda Lapbook I shared in the previous post is part of a unit study on Panda. Besides doing that and visiting the pandas in the zoo, we also made a tee shirt and a panda clay figurine.

Panda Tee Shirt

What’s a mom to do if she is too cheapskate to pay money for a panda tee shirt sold in the zoo? Make one!

First, I looked for a nice panda print and print it off the internet. This cute one is from here. They also have other panda printables if you are interested in more panda activities.

I printed out this panda to make a stencil. In order to make a stencil, I glued this onto a thin cardboard.

Then I use a marker to thicken the lines. This is to create a thickness so that when I cut out the picture, the line would be a space to colour into.

The end result looks like this :

Next, I cut out the panda. From this picture, you can see what I mean when I said I thickened the lines so that they become a space.

Inevitably, there were pieces that came detached. I use masking tape to tape them in place so that I get the picture of the panda.

I inserted another piece of cardboard into a plain white tee shirt so that the paint would not get through to the back of the tee shirt. The tee shirt had to be smoothen nicely over the board. The board was secured with clips.

I secured the stencil over the area where I wanted the panda to be and got #3 to paint into the spaces using fabric paint. Some areas, such are the edges were a little harder for him to get to, so I had to do some touch up for him after he was done. While he painted, I had to supervise him closely to make sure that the stencil stayed in place and he didn’t paint into the wrong spaces.

When he was done with most of the parts, I moved the detached parts so that he could paint over the spaces where the masking tape pieces were. Basically, because this was a homemade stencil, I had to think more of the sequence of painting, where to paint first, which pieces to move, etc.

When the painting was done, we left the shirt to dry.

But it didn’t seem very complete…..

So I went to look for a picture of bamboo plant and printed it out.

I created a stencil of the bamboo plant just like how I did it for the panda, and I got #3 to paint it on the tee shirt.

I can’t remember where I got the bamboo print. If you google, you should be able to find plenty.

The end product.

A friend taught me to iron the shirt to seal the colour in before washing.

#3 wore this shirt to the zoo to see Kai Kai and Jia Jia.

Panda Clay Figurine

The next thing we did was a clay figuring. I am hopeless at art and craft and I have never made a clay figure in my whole life. I talked to an art teacher once to get a little bit of instructions from her and that was all the ‘training’ I got. So it is really not surprising that our clay figurine didn’t turn out very nice. Nevertheless, we are not fussy.

So first, I rolled up paper and created a sort of structure using the paper and masking tape. After that I got #3 to put clay over the paper structure. He needed a lot of help to create a recognisable shape. I wasn’t any better at it either.

We used a lot of help from pictures of pandas in Natgeo magazines, internet, and photos people took of the pandas in the zoo.

After making the figurine, we left it to dry. For days! It didn’t help that the weather has been rather wet.

When the figurine was finally dried completely, #3 painted it. First he painted the whole thing white because the clay is a little on the off-white, greyish side. We used acrylic paint. Alas! I found that we didn’t have enough white! Thank God Popular sold acrylic paint in individual tubes, so I didn’t have to buy a whole set just for the white.

It wasn’t very easy to get the thing evenly painted. When it was finally painted all white, we left it to dry again. Thankfully, this time it didn’t take days.

Next, we painted the black parts, which was a bit tricky because #3 kept getting black paint on places where it should be white. It was all accidental. When all the black parts dried up, I coloured over the accidents with white acrylic paint again.

Again, I relied a lot on pictures of panda to see exactly where the black parts are. It was a bit hard to tell #3 exactly where to paint. I use pencils to mark out areas where he should paint black. That helped but still a lot of touch up was needed after he was done.

I decided not to stress over the eyes part which was a bit tricky to get right. We also didn’t have the right brush for such a tiny part. So I decided to just stick the eyes on instead. Unfortunately, it kind of made the panda look a bit like racoon. Fortunately, #3 didn’t mind. 😛

This is the final product. Does it look more like a panda or a raccoon??